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Axodious writes "As of March 30th, FileFront, one of the most popular repositories for sharing online gaming videos, will be suspended due to the recent economic downfall. In a brief post, FileFront's management said, 'We regret to inform you that due to the current economic conditions we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended.' With FileFront shutting down, what will be next? Fileplanet?"

Are you crazy, $20 million? WTF is wrong with you, $20 billion more like. Okay, $40 billion, you talked me into it. This is a crisis WORSE THAN THE GREAT DEPRESSION, duh? To hell with it, new plan: we send $1 billion to everyone in the USA, that will -seriously- ramp up spending, I'm super seriously. And don't you dare call this trying to dig your way out of a hole:P

Why can't they just move to bittorrent? I'm gathering all my clan's favorite CTF maps and will be starting a torrent of them and publicizing it so people don't have to go register at file-sends-you-lots-of-spam-to-buy-their-service-planet.

I will be sad to see FileFront go, they were my favorite. The least nonsense, just click a button and get a usually-anywhere-from-1.3-5megabytes/second-fast download.

I would be wary about downloading content like game patches from a torrent site. There is a long history of crackers using altered versions of patches and keygens to spread malware.

I have always thought that having to go to a third party site like FileFront to download a patch for a game was ridiculous. If a publisher is releasing a patch they should host it themselves not make their customers jump through hoops registering on a third party site and queueing for a download. And the same goes for games that rely on P2P based updater programs to patch the game.

WoW is one of the worst for this, I don't want to have to download patches using their custom BitTorrent client when it would be 10 times faster from a direct download. I realise that using BitTorrent spreads the load when a new patch comes out but it also hands the bandwidth bill to their customers, some of whom are on low cap connections and just want the patch they need not to burn through a GB of their bandwidth uploading it to other people.

I would be wary about downloading content like game patches from a torrent site. There is a long history of crackers using altered versions of patches and keygens to spread malware.

This wouldn't be an issue if publishers provided md5 checksums [wikipedia.org] for the patches, so you could confirm it was unmodified. Unfortunately since Windows doesn't come with a tool like md5sum, most game publishers don't seem to think it's useful to provide checksums for their files. Grrr.

Well, if they really cared about helping users ensure they were downloading genuine patches, they could just post the checksums and a link to one of the 40 million free md5 tools for Windows. But they don't, so they don't.

I would be wary about downloading content like game patches from a torrent site. There is a long history of crackers using altered versions of patches and keygens to spread malware.

I've heard many people make this claim before but I've never ever seen it in practise, and I've been using game cracks since I first acquired them with a 2400 baud modem. In my experience the cracking scene is basically a global competition to become the most reputable, famous, skillful cracker. Maybe your experience differs but I've had absolutely nothing but convenience and quality in game cracks over the last 16 years or so.

I've heard many people make this claim before but I've never ever seen it in practise

A lot of keygens and cracks have trojans in them, less so with releases from major groups but often the cracks the groups release are altered and reposted with trojans tacked on. There was a trend at one point for hiding trojans in fake keygens that sniffed the registry for cd keys. These cd keys were then added into new versions of the 'key-gens' that were actually just a static list of keys pretending to be generated by the program.

As you say the people who actually crack the games have their own ethics so their releases are normally free of malware but it is trivial for someone with no such ethics to download their release and add malware to it.

Wow, really? I honestly had no idea. I use Firefox with noscript and flashblock so I'm pretty much immune to that sort of stuff. I guess I'll have to advise everyone to do the same before visting those sites. Sorry if I ruffled any feathers!

I've heard many people make this claim before but I've never ever seen it in practise, and I've been using game cracks since I first acquired them with a 2400 baud modem. In my experience the cracking scene is basically a global competition to become the most reputable, famous, skillful cracker. Maybe your experience differs but I've had absolutely nothing but convenience and quality in game cracks over the last 16 years or so.

It depends on where you get the cracks. If you've got direct connections "in the scene," yeah, you're pretty safe. OTOH, if you rely on things like IRC channels or.box.sk to find your cracks, then the guys making the cracks/keygens available usually aren't the same ones who wrote it. It's passed through a lot of grubby paws of people who don't care about cracking reputation.

What? Are you sure you aren't confusing anything? FileFront was totaly awesome not too long ago... until it suddenly wasn't. You could easily browse the files by games and categories (mods, maps, models, etc), then select one of the few mirrors and download it without any further bullshit. FilePlanet, on the other hand, was pretty bad and IIRC required registration or even paid subscription to get anything, and then you still had to wait in the queue before you could start downloading.

FileFront's demise for me came when I once couldn't download anything. I don't remember the specific error, but at first it looked like it might be a temporary problem which could be solved by simply trying later. I never managed to bypass it though, and a few searches revealed that it was a common error for european users. Apparently this was their way of not servicing some countries/regions.

Rapidshare's entirely different matter, but even then it's not that bad if you need just one file as all you have to deal with is a captcha.

So, what you are saying is that the site ultimately sucked, right? Then you seem to concur with the original poster. He didn't say it was designed badly or that he hated it from the moment it started. He merely stated that he "despised it". Your comment sure doesn't evoke much love for the site either.

No, that's not really what I'm saying at all. Would you say the McLaren F1 ultimately sucked because it's been discontinued 11 years ago after only 106 were made? It's possible that the parent poster also received a similar error, but by equating it with Fileplanet the impression was made that these two sites were equally bad.

Also, "despise" is quite a strong word for something that works quite well and is much better than most competition, which was the case with FF here. So sure, a clear message like "We'

Rapidshare's entirely different matter, but even then it's not that bad if you need just one file as all you have to deal with is a captcha.

Unless you happen to use an ISP that has transparent proxies, then you can never download a file because someone else in your region of about 2 million people used it in the last four hours. If I see Rapidshare, I stop immediately.

I don't remember FileFront, but I agree with Rapidshare, and especially Fileplanet. I honestly couldn't figure out how Fileplanet stayed in business -- I can't think of a single customer who actually liked it, let alone wanted to pay for it.

The gaming industry is growing up. Amazon S3 is a genuine option. So is Steam, for those trying to sell a game. In fact, I'm pretty sure Fileplanet predates BitTorrent -- and I'm pretty sure I haven't seen it change much since then.

It's too bad, really. I remember when FilePlanet was actually a really good site to get patches, mods, and demos from.

As FilePlanet (and similar sites) became shittier, I actually found myself more inclined to look on various warez sites for full game versions. Or, as more often happened, I'd just not bother and pull out an old-but-good game and play that instead.

Maybe if they didn't suck the brass nob so hard, they'd not be going away.

Yes, considering the really shitty interface for finding and installing programs in Windows it's really a stupid move to make things harder. I only buy games that I know are hassle free, or buy and hour or two every month in a local "arcade".

Actually I quite liked FileFront. High download speeds (it nearly caps out my 10Mb connection), a limited number of ads, and no waiting in line, unlike the eyesore that is FilePlanet. I'm sad to see it go. I think you all are just lumping them together when they really are not one in the same.

A bittorrent tracker is nice, but when people stop seeding, the content is as good as dead. Perhaps combine a tracker with a host that always seeds the stuff so at least there is one host that people can get content from, and if they are polite, they will stay on until they have uploaded as much as they downloaded.

Yes, obviously. They currently spend the money on a server anyway, so this wouldn't be some huge change. Instead of a couple dozen devoted servers sending files at 200 kb/sec, they could have a dozen servers permanently seeding 1000s of files each. With some overlap, the whole system would be automatically distributed and redundant.

The biggest benefit to the company would be the ability to decrease the peak bandwidth for the rare cases a popular file is uploaded. The peer cloud would get huge right when the

I've always hated intermediary sites that exist purely because developers and publishers wanted to save a few pennies on file hosting.If, as a gem developer I want you to try my demos, watch my videos and look at my screenshots, I'll host them myself. That way I have 100% uptime, I know tjhey are easy to find, there are no ads or registration screens or other fuss to get between my customers and my product, and both me and my customers are happy.

The thing is that some file hosting is pretty expensive, especially if the demo program is pretty big. A lot of ISPs will charge by the gig, so people accessing a multi-gigabyte app will get expensive quite quickly. Even something fairly small (60-100 megs) will add up fast if it gets popular.

I know registration sucks, but downloads before Web, FTP and others were pretty rough. If you were new to the BBS scene, you had to either pay a sysop for download credit, or find someway of finding something releva

The thing is that some file hosting is pretty expensive, especially if the demo program is pretty big.

Maybe if publishers had to bear the cost of hosting multi-hundred-megabyte patches themselves instead of shunting it off onto third parties, they'd work harder before release to ensure that their product won't require multi-hundred-megabyte patches...

I couldn't agree more. With the exception of us indie devs, the ability to put together games in small file sizes has become a lost art. People actually ship demos with wavs rather than oggs, and bmps when jpgs would do. Identical geometry and textures get released in a single installation, and textures are often larger than they will ever appear onscreen.The worst sin is devs which release demos containing tons of art and sound assets that can never be used in the demo level. This still goes on, because no

While I agree including assets that are not used in the demo levels is lazy and wasteful...I don't understand the problem with using WAVS or BMPs actually. Everything should be compressed into the executable anyway. Yes, jpegs or mp3 result in a lower overall filesize...but they result in loss of quality to acheive this. Some users might find this acceptable to quicken the download and get a taste of the action, but I feel that most would probably just say that you game had crappy graphics or bad sound.

I can't tell much difference between ogg and wav when it comes to stuff like bullet sounds or footsteps. Can you? Mp3 is a bit tinny, but ogg sounds perfect to me.And a LOT of artwork in games can get away with compression. When artists have to zoom in to maximum zoom and look at two image side by side, you know you are just wasting bandwidth.

This is Slashdot. People here will claim to know the difference between every possible combination of audio/video codecs, file format, bitrate, etc. And my silent FLAC collection is way more clear than my neighbor's crappy 128kb MP3 silent audio files. I can hear the silence WAY, WAY better.

Anyone can distribute popular data very cheaply now-a-days. It happens all the time with new television episodes: there are generally only one or two unique video encodings of a single episode, and tens of thousands of people have it within a few hours of it hitting the net. Except for the the torrent trackers, this all happens entirely on consumer hardware.

Patches even have the advantage over the above example by being legal.

The company should first run a torrent tracker for the patch and remain in the tor

The thing is that some file hosting is pretty expensive, especially if the demo program is pretty big. A lot of ISPs will charge by the gig, so people accessing a multi-gigabyte app will get expensive quite quickly. Even something fairly small (60-100 megs) will add up fast if it gets popular.

I know registration sucks, but downloads before Web, FTP and others were pretty rough. If you were new to the BBS scene, you had to either pay a sysop for download credit, or find someway of finding something relevant you can upload before you could download a single bit. Of course, you had to make some inane posts to the board's forums due to post/call radios, and all this was assuming you could get something else than a busy signal if you are trying to get to a popular board.

The Good: FileFront is shutting down, so all of the random junk probably won't have a home and all of the good stuff will find it worthwhile finding a better host that isn't full of adverts and idiots. (I set up one of my websites because the FileFront site was such a horrible place with annoying members and a high noise to signal ratio)

The Bad: The idiots will have to find somewhere else, so we'll have otherwise usable sites suddenly flooded with the "give me it on a silver platter because I can't be bothered while I spout gibberish in badly written and incomprehensible sentences".

I remember looking for an obscure Supreme Commander patch(version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx to version x.x.xx.xx.xxxx), and that was one of the few sites that had it. Fileplanet would throw me in a queue for 45 mins, then give me sub-par DL speeds. Filefront always maxed out my 3mbit connection, for every download, and let me download it right away.

This is probably what killed their site. Hosting -- once you get to the large VPS/dedicated server level -- is expensive. Hosting for a high bandwidth site is extremely expensive.

They couldn't pay their bills because advertising on the 'net is a failing industry. The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.

I'm sure plenty of people will reply to this saying that adverts on many sites suck, are intrusive and annoying. Well, maybe, but that doesn't mean you should block all ads on every site. How are medium-large site owners supposed to pay their bills?

To summarize the prevailing groupthink: There's no ethical difficulty in using a service that is nominally paid for via ad serving and then blocking the ads regardless of intrusiveness. Oh and we don't want to pay for content either.

The sites don't get money from just people who visit the site and see the ads, people have to actually click them. I understand your point but your theory presumes that people who block the ads would click them if they didn't block them.

Before I began using Firefox with adblock I considered ads as mainly a nuisance because, like you said, they were often intrusive and made it harder to find the stuff I was looking for from the site. Due to this I simply learned to ignore the ads and I can count on one hand's fingers the occasions on which I actually clicked some ad.

The problem is not with the people. People block the ads because they're annoying and hence not very interesting. The problem is the ads themselves. The advertisement tactic used in the net is too much based on the same tactic companies use on the streets: The bigger the better. On the streets this work because the bigger and more colourful the ad is the more chance there is that people will notice it. However, when you make the ads on the net big, colourful and often moving (sometimes even with sound effects) and then fill a webpage with these ads they stop working and instead of arousing interest you're just making people annoyed.

I can't see why people would click on ads they consider irritating even if they would see them. Now that there are free and easy-to-use tools that efficiently block the ads of course people will use it, but it's not their "fault", it's the advertisers fault for making ads too damn frustraiting. So in short: Ad blocking is not the cause, it's an effect. The core of the problem lies within the business model of web advertising.

I can't see why people would click on ads they consider irritating even if they would see them.

You're seriously overestimating the rationality of human beings. Study after study after study shows that human beings are easily influenced by advertising, even when they claim they're not, even when they find the advertising "annoying." As the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Yes, there is.
This human not only reacts to heavy advertising with ad blocking, but also tends to boycott products whose commercials annoy him.

Now that I have fulfilled my monthly quota of talking about myself in the 3rd person, I withdraw.

This is probably what killed their site. Hosting -- once you get to the large VPS/dedicated server level -- is expensive. Hosting for a high bandwidth site is extremely expensive.

So what you need is a sustainable income to support it, which adverts aren't.

They couldn't pay their bills because advertising on the 'net is a failing industry. The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.

No, as pointed out by other people, the reason it is failing is because of the way the industry behaves. Of the tens of thousands (or more) of ads that AdBlock has blocked for me I'd probably have clicked on a grand sum of about two of them at most, if it was really interesting. Maybe if things were less intrusive and more targetted to the audience of the site showing the advert then people might be more likely to click on them and less likely to block them.

How are medium-large site owners supposed to pay their bills?

Targetted affiliate links? Targetted self-hosted adverts? Sponsored links? I'm hardly doing any work and every month I've more than recovered the cost of my VPS account, sometimes several times over. That's just with two affiliate links that I use in targetted locations appropriate to each link.

Working on the Internet is an utterly thankless task sometimes.

Exactly, and people shouldn't expect to be bailed out by visitors and advertising. I host my sites a) because I want to b) because I enjoy working with it and improving it and c) because I know that people are making use of things even if they don't say anything or give any feedback.

They couldn't pay their bills because advertising on the 'net is a failing industry. The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.

I don't click ads. Would you rather have me wasting their bandwidth?

Kiuas already summed it up, below:

The problem is not with the people. People block the ads because they're annoying and hence not very interesting. The problem is the ads themselves. The advertisement tactic used in the net is too much based on the same tactic companies use on the streets: The bigger the better. On the streets this work because the bigger and more colourful the ad is the more chance there is that people will notice it. Howe

That's not to say that I believe your particular blocking of their ads is directly responsible for their downfall - but the many thousands of people blocking ads can't have helped. I'm as fond of adblock as the next guy, but if I like a free site and it hasn't thrown some full-page Flash ad at me yet, they can shovel ads in my face all they like - I get a free service in return, I have no complaints.

I've got adblock too, but not everyone does so saying "go to gamename.filefront.com" used to assault them with excessive horrible ads, including popups at one point. That was why one of my sites was set up with the aim of not having any adverts on it at all and serving quality content.

As for what's wrong with it, I already said. For the games I play it has too much rubbish on there (Football team badges in the 41st millenium? Random corporation logos? Other miscellany junk?) and too many idiots. I tried to

Actually the publisher was terrible. The game in question was the second Elite sequel, Frontier: First Encounters. They released an alpha demo that David Braben had sent them as the full game because they wanted it out for Christmas '95.

I think a few patches came out but the final patch only stopped the game from crashing, the main story missions were never fully implemented, although you can see some of the mission texts if you look in the binary.

Ah, it seemed like good customer service without all of the detail! Still, more companies should do the "caring to some degree about customers after the sale is made and not just ignoring you because they made their money" bit.

When those services appeared sort of like a middle men mostly between me and a public ftp server the first days. I thought to myself, another idiocy which hit the web. Ok I know filefront and others nowadays host content themselves, but it still is rather pointless even to use such a service for a quick sharing of files.

I just moved there from RapidShare to store some stuff after I found out RapidShare now deletes file after x amount of downloads (I think 10). And now I have to move again. Sure it wasn't perfect, but it was FREE as in BEER.

And I'm not entirely against using Darwinian tactics to weed out the computer clueless form the internet. If you can't figure out what link is the actual download link, then maybe you shouldn't have the file.

I really don't care. All that site ever did was annoy me. I don't think it even works with cookies disabled (it's a fucking file host, what does it need cookies for???). Or maybe it just doesn't work with Opera at ALL. Either of those. Dunno but I can't bring myself to care about the death of a site that made it unnecessarily complicated to get to a download and that companies would use to dump huge and popular files onto (resulting in abysmal download rates and really long queues). I avoided them as much a

This is personally very sad to me. When my team and I set up BeyondUnreal back in 2001, FileFront was one of our original two file mirrors (eDome was the other). I remember clearly speaking with the great Mark Molinaro of FileFront, who has always been a huge proponent of the open source community, and who was 100% behind supporting our growing Unreal-powered gaming community. Never once in all that time did FileFront waver in their support of our efforts.

Unfortunately, this is a sign of the times. As the ad revenue streams dry up, it becomes more difficult to run ad-supported businesses. eDome suffered the same fate: there was no money in the file hosting business.

Farewell, FileFront, and thank you for being such a good friend to literally THOUSANDS of online communities just like mine.

I was the "executive news editor" at Filefront from 2004-2006. Everything went as well as it could, I had a 19 year old boss and upper management I'd never met. Covering E3 2004 was a blast though, watching my PR manager get totally pwned by Fata1ity in UT was a treat.